


Sweet Silence

by Evandar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Consensual Underage Relationship, Don't copy to another site, Father/Son Incest, M/M, Parent/Child Incest, Secret Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 12:10:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17960243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evandar/pseuds/Evandar
Summary: There is something wrong in the House of Black; a new kind of tension building, with Regulus at its centre. Sirius is determined to find out what it is.





	Sweet Silence

**Author's Note:**

> Posted for HPKinkFest 2019. Thanks to Writcraft and Kitty_Fic for running this fest, and to Gracerene and Liz_Mo for their wonderful beta work. You guys are the best.

He’s not sure what catches his attention at dinner. The atmosphere is stilted as usual, conversation prohibited. There’s only the gentle clink of silver on china, the soft sounds of breathing and chewing, and the heavy feeling that’s part and parcel of living in a house where none of the occupants can stand each other. But whatever it is that makes him look up doesn’t matter so much as what he sees when he does. What he doesn’t see.

His mother, on his left, is as pinch-faced and hateful as always. His father, to his right, is perfectly poised and blank. On the opposite side of the table, Regulus is eating with the same, mechanical precision that he perfected at the age of three. He’s not looking at anyone or, for that matter, _anything_ except his plate, and there’s nothing unusual about that either, but there’s the tiniest of smirks playing at the corner of his mouth. 

Sirius feels a chill run up his spine; a sense of disquiet that he can’t quite grasp. When he next looks up at his brother, the smirk is gone. The feeling remains.

…

He’s always found it difficult to sleep at home after spending the year at Hogwarts. He misses Peter’s snoring and the way James talks in his sleep. He misses Remus’ soft breathing and the way that, as the full moon draws near, he begins to whine and growl in his dreams. Grimmauld Place is a stifled, repressed monstrosity of a house, suffocating under layers of complex wards and his family’s archaic attitudes.

Stuck in his room, there’s none of the familiar noises of Hogwarts. Instead, he can hear the incessant ticking of the grandfather clock at the end of the hall, his own breathing, and nothing else. Muggle posters leer down at him, faded and made queer by the streetlight filtering through his curtains. He shifts on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. His eyes catch on the fragile shadows cast by the bat skeletons hanging from his ceiling – a grim childhood mobile that he’s somehow remained fond of – and he lets his breathing slow and his mind drift as he follows their movements. He’s almost asleep when something changes. A new noise – a step and the squeak of hinges; the rumble of a low voice just barely on the edge of hearing.

Sirius’ eyes snap back open. The feeling from dinner – a niggling awareness that something isn’t right – returns. The skin on the back of his neck prickles.

He slides out of bed.

He’s had the layout of his room memorised for so long that he manages to reach the door without so much of a creak. He opens it slowly, and there’s warm light spilling out across the hall from Regulus’ room. He sees his father silhouetted for a moment before he closes the door behind him.

Sirius opens his door wider, leaning his shoulder against the frame and holding his breath as he listens. Not for the first time, he wishes that the Animagus transformation was complete already and that he could use the sharpened senses of his canine form. As it is, he’s reduced to listening to the unintelligible rumble of his father’s baritone and trying to decipher the tone as best he can. Has Regulus done something? Was that little smirk at dinner a sign of some previously unheard-of sense of mischief? His little brother’s sense of humour is far subtler than his own; Regulus is shy and too intelligent for his own good, and his idea of fun lies in obscure books and the wit of ancient poets. He’s never, not once, shown any interest in any of Sirius’ pranks, so the idea that he might have started _now_ is ludicrous. 

So, the smirk meant something else. His father’s presence in his brother’s room late at night means something else. 

Sirius isn’t stupid. He’s not blind either. He’s heard whispers of some Dark Lord rising through society’s ranks, preaching pureblood supremacy and death to Muggleborns. And while such rhetoric is far more to his mother’s tastes than his father’s, he’s not ignorant enough to believe that his father has any good opinion of any Muggleborn at all. He’d rather they all just remained out of his notice. But Sirius has heard things about this Dark Lord on the Hogwarts grapevine: that he’s been meeting with young and influential purebloods in Hogsmeade and London. That most of those people either are or were Slytherins. 

The possibility of his father encouraging his brother to be recruited by some genocidal mad-man makes his stomach churn. He bites his lip and breathes out slowly through his nose. He has to know. He knows already that he’ll never bow and kiss anyone’s robe hems and that no one will ever be able to make him but he needs to know if there’s a chance that one day, he’ll face his brother across a battlefield. He… he needs to prepare.

He creeps forward. 

He presses close to the wood of his brother’s door and lowers to his knees. There’s a gap under the door that might – just maybe - be enough for him to sneak a peak at what’s going on. Or allow him to listen. He tries to look first, but all he can see is his father’s sock-clad feet as they cross the room, and the deep pile of the carpet. His eyes blur and he turns his head so that his ear is as close to the crack as possible.

He hears Regulus speak – his brother’s voice is higher and softer than their father’s, it hasn’t finished breaking yet – but he can’t quite catch the words. His tone, though, is one that Sirius has never heard before. Not from Regulus, anyway. It’s gentle and lilting. Coaxing, almost. His father’s response is too quiet to hear, but something about it – _something_ – makes Sirius shiver.

There’s a soft noise. Something wet. And Regulus’ voice whispering the one recognisable word in the entire exchange. _“Daddy.”_

…

Sirius has never made any great study of his father. His greatest opponent at home is, and has always been, his mother. His father, for the most part, has been a distant figure – busy with the Wizengamot and his ward-crafting business. Outside of dinner time, he’s usually closed away behind his office door or absent entirely. Sirius has always had the impression that, had be been given the choice to be anything other than the perfect pureblood, Orion Arcturus Black would never have married and never had children. Certainly, he’s never seemed overly interested in either of them.

Except. 

He does remember, vaguely, his father tending to his bedside when he was ill in childhood. That deep, melodious voice reading from _Beedle the Bard_ , and a long-fingered hand brushing hair back off his sweating forehead. He remembers one or two occasions, at Yule, where he and Regulus had curled up at their father’s feet, leaning against his thighs and listening to stories as their father sipped from a green drink that swirled and glowed in the firelight. Absinthe, he knows now – he’s seen a bottle of it on the top shelf of The Three Broomsticks. He tries not to think of those times very often and beyond those memories, there’s little. His father is an acquaintance at best. He is _father_ , never _dad_ or _daddy_.

He watches closely over the next few days, his father and Regulus both. There’s not overly much to see – his father’s office door is as closed as always, and Regulus is as much a bore as he’s always been. He watches his brother doing his homework for so long that he inevitably gives up and does his own. They sit in near-comfortable silence together, quills scratching and pages turning, for days before Sirius’ patience begins to wear out. _Something_ is going on, he _knows it_. He just can’t _see_ it yet.

Family dinners have been nothing short of torturous. His mother is the same as always, which is bad enough, but there’s a new kind of tension creeping through the house with Regulus at its epicentre. His brother’s little smirks have become more frequent; more than once, Sirius catches Regulus glancing at their father from under his lashes in a way that makes his breath catch and his stomach twist. Their father, calm and glacial as ever, barely seems to have noticed – barely, because Sirius could swear that he’s seen signs to the contrary. Dark-eyed glances over the soup course, and suchlike. Whether their mother has noticed anything is harder to tell. Her spite has always been at a constant level and, for that matter, aimed at all of them to varying degrees. At Sirius most of all, for being such a terrible disappointment, but also at Regulus for his effeminate softness and at their father for… presumably, for not being the husband she’d once dreamed of having. It hasn’t escaped Sirius that their parents haven’t arranged any marriage contracts yet, despite both him and Regulus being past the age for a traditional betrothal. It seems that there’s _one_ tradition they’re both willing to let die.

He lies awake every night waiting, listening intently for any noise in the corridor. He waits and waits and _finally_ it happens. Soft footfalls. He slides out of bed in an instant, creeping to the door and cracking it open just a touch – just enough to see his father.

He’s shed his robes since dinner, and he prowls down the corridor stripped to his shirt, trousers and waistcoat. It’s an oddly intimate view of him: in his silhouette Sirius can see the tapering of his waist and the musculature of his thighs. He swallows. He shrinks back as his father approaches, hiding in shadows until he hears the squeak of hinges. Peering out again, he sees Regulus’ bedroom light turn on. 

His father stands in the doorway. He’s leaning against the frame, head tilted and his hand still curled around the door handle. He’s waiting for something. The idea that it’s _permission_ is hilarious – Blacks don’t _ask permission_ – but that’s exactly what it seems to be because he doesn’t enter Regulus’ bedroom until Sirius hears his brother’s voice.

“Do you need me, daddy?” It’s that lilting, stomach-twisting tone again, and Sirius bites his lip in response. He watches transfixed as Regulus’ door opens wider and his brother appears. He can’t see much of Regulus past their father, but he can see enough to know that his brother’s hair is down from his customary ponytail and that he’s changed into his nightshirt. The pallor of his bare feet seems ghostly in the lamplight. 

He watches as his brother’s fingers curl around their father’s wrist. He holds his breath as Regulus’ face tilts up, and there’s just enough light spilling from his room for Sirius to see the glittering of his eyes and the smirk stretched over his mouth. No, not a smirk; a genuine smile – something Sirius hasn’t seen from his brother since long before they’d both started Hogwarts.

It surprises him how pretty Regulus is.

His father, he realises, must agree with that assessment, because he chuckles softly and pushes away from the doorframe. His response – a low, “I always need you, my darling,” – is mostly drowned out by the hammering of Sirius’ own heart as he watches his father lean down.

The soft, wet noise of their kiss is uncomfortably familiar. Sirius feels something hard lodge in his gut as he realises that this isn’t some kind of recruitment for a Dark Lord; it isn’t some cruel scheming. His father… his brother… they…

The door closes, hiding them from view, and Sirius scurries across the hall to drop to his knees and peer through the crack once more. He watches their feet move across the carpet – black socks and pale, bare toes stepping back towards Regulus’ bed as if they’re dancing. Something white drops to the carpet and he sees pearl buttons shine. His brother’s nightshirt. He loses sight of them then, and again turns his head to try and hear. There’s rustling, the wet sound he knows now is kissing, something that’s certainly a moan but quiet enough that he can’t quite tell who it was.

He jerks away, unwilling to listen to more than that. He stands and dashes back to his own room, closing the door silently and fleeing back to the comfort of his bed. His hands are shaking. There’s a horrible, twisting sensation in his chest and his belly, and he stares up at the bat skeletons as they twist their shadows over his ceiling.

How?

How long?

He swallows the hysterical urge to scream and clenches his fingers in the duvet. He has power over them both, now; incest closer than first cousins is illegal in the Wizarding World and has been for centuries. One slip, one suggestion to the wrong person, and his father’s career and reputation would be in tatters; Regulus would be disgraced forever. His mother, more likely than not, would kill them both if she ever found out. Sirius could do it. Tell her. Burn the whole Noble and Most Ancient House of Black down around them.

But. 

_But._

He doesn’t actually hate Regulus. Not really. There’s nothing Regulus could do that _would_ make him hate him, since _actually fucking their father_ isn’t enough, apparently. And every time the idea of telling crosses his mind, he remembers that brief glimpse of his brother’s face – the love, the happiness – and the realisation that, at first glance, he hadn’t known what happiness looked like on his only sibling.

The realisation that he doesn’t know what it looks like on his father, either.

…

Regulus shifts awkwardly in his seat at breakfast. Sirius passes him the sugar for his tea and pretends that he hasn’t seen anything. He pretends not to notice the coy smile that curls his brother’s mouth as their father joins them; pretends that their father doesn’t return it in the slight deepening of the lines around his eyes.

Sirius eats his bacon and lets the silence of the House of Black press down on him. He doesn’t say a word and swears to himself that no one, _no one_ , will know what he saw.

He’ll take their secret to his grave.


End file.
